Is the Dow Hazardous to Your Health?

Their research therefore demonstrates that these signals “reach a large share of the general population and influence attitudes both about the economy and the level of life satisfaction.”

In a preview of their results, they find that cigarette consumption and the number of days that a respondent reports experiencing poor mental health increases during a large monthly decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, independent of other measures of macroeconomic conditions.

“When restricting attention to the stock market crashes of 1987 and 2008-2009, respondents additionally reported more binge drinking,” they write. “This broader increase in the riskiness of health behaviors during acute, protracted stock market declines is then confirmed in the data by a sharp increase in drunken driving fatalities during the 2008-2009 market crash.”

 The alcohol and cigarette consumption behavior patterns are also confirmed by considering household purchase data. Collectively, they note, these estimates are consistent with the idea that the general state of the stock market impacts individual’s behavioral choices in “meaningful ways.”

“The pattern of results presented in this paper strongly suggests that the way in which individuals behave with respect to their health during economic downturns depends critically on how which aspects of the downturn are being considered,” the authors conclude.